“Where are we going?” she asked again, knowing it was useless. Beside her, Frank Blyleven was no longer smiling. He sweated inside his spacesuit as he drove the tractor. When he’d made his deal with Martin Humphries, it had been for nothing more serious than allowing Humphries to tap into Astro Corporation’s communications net. A good chunk of money for practically no risk. Now he was ferrying a kidnapped woman, a Nobel scientist, for the lord’s sweet sake! Humphries was going to have to pay extra for this. Blyleven had to admit, though, that Humphries had smarts. Stavenger wants to search for Dr. Cardenas? Okay. Who better to spirit her out of Selene for a while than the head of Astro’s security department? Nobody asked any questions when he showed up at the garage already suited up, with another spacesuited person alongside him.

“Got to inspect the communications antennas out on Nubium,” he told the guard checking out the tractors. “We’ll be out about six hours.” Sure enough, three hours into his aimless wandering across the desolate mare, he got a radio signal from Humphries’s people. “Okay, bring her back.”

Smiling again, he leaned his helmet against Cardenas’s so she could hear him through sound conduction.

“We’re going back now,” he said. “They’ll have a team to meet you. You behave yourself when we get to the garage.”

Kris Cardenas felt a huge surge of gratitude well up inside her. We’re going back.

We’ll be safe once we’re back inside.

Then she realized that she was still Humphries’s prisoner, and she wasn’t really safe at all.

Dan felt simmering anger as he watched George’s report on the wall-screen of the ship’s wardroom.

“I was in on th’ search of Humphries’s place. It’s big enough to hide a dozen people. We din’t find Dr. Cardenas or any trace of her,” George ended morosely. “She must still be alive, then,” Dan said. Then he blew out an impatient huff of breath as he realized that George wouldn’t hear his words for another twenty minutes or so.

Pancho was sitting beside him in the wardroom, looking more puzzled than worried as George’s image faded from the wallscreen. “If they haven’t found her body,” Dan said to her, “it means she’s probably still alive.”

“Or they’ve stashed the corpse outside,” Pancho suggested.

Dan nodded glumly.

“Why would Humphries want to kill Dr. Cardenas?” Pancho asked. “Because she found out something that she wanted to tell me; something that Humphries doesn’t want me to know.”

“What?”

“How should I know?” Dan snapped.

Pancho grinned lamely. “Yeah, I guess that was a pretty dumb question.” Dan rubbed his chin, muttering, “Humphries knew the security people were coming to search his place so he just moved her somewhere else until the search was over. I’ll bet a ton of diamonds she’s back inside his house now. He’ll want to keep her close.”

“Prob’ly,” Pancho agreed.

“I wish there was a way we could get somebody into Humphries’s place without him knowing it,” Dan mused.

Pancho sat up straighter “There is,” she said, with a sly smile. George counted it as a sign of Doug Stavenger’s respect for Dr. Cardenas that he agreed to a private meeting.

“Invisible?” Stavenger looked shocked. “A cloak of invisibility?”

“I know it sounds nutty,” George said, “but Dan told me that—”

“It’s not nutty,” Stavenger murmured, steepling his fingers before his face. “I’m stunned, though, that Ike Walton told anyone about it.”

“You mean it’s real? A cloak of invisibility?” Stavenger eyed the big Aussie from behind his desk. “It’s real, all right. But I doubt that it comes in your size. We’re going to have to put the loose-lipped Mr. Walton back to work.” The worst part about this, Dan fumed silently, is being so far apart that we can’t talk in real time.

He had paced the length of the crew module several times, from the bridge where Pancho and Amanda chatted amiably while monitoring the ship’s highly automated systems to the sensor bay at the far end of the passageway, where Fuchs was bent over the sample of superconducting wire. George’s last message had an almost fairy-tale quality to it. “Stavenger’s got the guy who made the cloak enlarging it to fit me. He’s over in th’ nanotech lab now, doin’ it. He says I’ll be able to sneak into Humphries’s place sometime tomorrow morning, if he doesn’t run into any snags.”

Rumpelstiltskin, Dan thought as he prowled along the passageway. No, he was the guy who spun straw into gold. Who had the cloak of invisibility? Pancho, he answered himself. Of all the sneaky con artists in the solar system, she’s the one who comes up with a cloak of invisibility. Well, chance favors the prepared mind, they say. Pancho was smart enough and fast enough to use what chance offered her.

He found himself at the sensor bay again. There wasn’t room for a chair. Fuchs was standing, staring at the same display screen he’d been staring at the last time Dan had looked in at him.

“Anything interesting?” Dan asked him.

Fuchs stirred as if being awakened from a dream. But from the worried expression on his face, Dan thought it might have been a nightmare. “What is it, Lars?”

“I’ve found what created the hot spot in this section of wire,” Fuchs said, his voice grave, solemn.

“Good!” said Dan.

“Not good,” Fuchs countered, shaking his head.

“What is it?”

Pointing to the curves traced across the display screen, Fuchs said, “The amount of copper in the wire is diminishing.”

“Huh?”

“The wire is superconducting only if its composition remains constant.”

“And it stays cooled down to liquid nitrogen temperature,” Dan added.

“Yes, of course. But this length of wire… its copper content is diminishing.”

“Diminishing? What do you mean?”

“Look at the curves!” Fuchs said, with some heat. Rapping his knuckles on the display screen he said, “In the past two hours the copper content has gone down six percent.”

Dan felt baffled. “How could-”

“As the copper content dwindles, the wire goes from a superconducting state to a normal state. It begins to heat up. The hot spot boils off some of the nitrogen coolant. The hot spot grows. It was only microscopic at first, but it eventually became large enough for the monitoring sensors to detect it.” Dan stared at him.

“There is only one agency that I can think of that could selectively remove copper atoms from the wire.”

“Nanomachines?” Dan squeaked.

Fuchs nodded solemnly. “This length of wire was seeded with nanomachines that remove copper atoms and release them into the liquid nitrogen coolant. Even now they are removing copper atoms and letting them flow into the air of this compartment.”

“Jesus H. Christ on a bicycle,” Dan said, his insides suddenly hollow. “That’s why Humphries grabbed Cardenas. She’s the nanotech expert.”

“We are infected,” Fuchs said.

“But you caught it in time,” Dan countered. “It’s only this one length of wire that’s infected.”

“I hope so,” Fuchs said. “Otherwise, we’re all dead.”